Receive articles by email or use the RSS below

Subscribe

Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.

Add Blog to the Marketing Blog DirectoryList your blog on the Internet's biggest and best Marketing Blog. The Marketing Blog is the premier source for the finding and posting marketing related blogs. Join for FREE!

Posts Tagged ‘trends’

You Can’t Import Friends

Right now, while there is ongoing debate about whether or not Ping was previously enabling the ability to import friend from Facebook, the reality is that at this point, you can’t import friends from anywhere. There isn’t even an email import functionality, which was the key tool that made most social networks go viral in the first place.

Ping Isn’t Global

Right now it isn’t possible to connect to Ping in the majority of countries. Instead, the service is currently limite to 23 countries. Given that most of my friends are in the U.S., it’s not a deal breaker for me personally, however it’s definitely going to be an issue if Apple wants global domination. Additionally, Ping only functions on Apple products! If Apple doesn’t open up their product to other companies, there’s no chance they’ll be able to kill Facebook.

Yes, iTunes doesn’t just run on Apple computers, however there are no other mobile devices that have iTunes or Ping available to them. Apple will need a more open strategy if they were to compete with Facebook in the long-term.

Uploading Photos Has Issues

I couldn’t get my profile photo uploading, and more significant is that photos must go through an approval process! That’s like an online dating site or something. Facebook thankfully has automated filtering systems. With all the software engineers over at Apple, you’d imagine the company would be able to come up with a more efficient system which doesn’t require the manual approval of all images.

Certain Areas Freeze

After trying to watch one of Lady Gaga’s videos within the service, I couldn’t figure out how to exit out of watching the video. This wasn’t the only area where I ran into minor user experience bugs that should have been resolved before pushing out the product. Then again, perhaps Apple has accepted the model in which products that don’t work are rolled out first and then the bugs are fixed afterwards.

Did I Mention No Friend Import?

This is seriously a deal breaker for any social network. It blows my mind that Apple would release a product that is missing some of the core features that are necessary for any successful social network. Then again, they released a phone that doesn’t work as a phone, so that’s not too surprising I guess.

Managing Another Social Network Is Annoying

I think Facebook may have been the social network which survived to the point where people aren’t willing to switch to another social network. Additionally, there is a large number of people who don’t use iTunes and they won’t install the software just to find out what music their family and friends are listening to. While many of us grew up on music, there are plenty of people for who music and computers don’t go together (GASP! Yes, those people exist).

I Need To Live In Apple’s World

Do you want to live under the control of Steve Jobs? Many have chosen to let Steve Jobs make their technology consumer decisions on behalf of them, however many people hate this. Just read yesterday’s comments on our Ping blog post if you had any question about whether or not people would make the shift. Even more significant was the numerous comments from our Page fans who said they had no interest in making the jump.

Outlandish Statements

Remember when Apple claimed that the iPad was a magical and revolutionary device? Try to find 100 people who own the device and say they love it. I own it but the only thing I use it for is reading books, and if that’s all I wanted to do on it in the first place, I should have just used my Amazon Kindle. While there are new forms of applications like Flipboard and Pulse, I’m not quite sure what’s magical about the device. Similarly, Apple claims that “Everyone who loves music is on Ping.” That’s a flat out lie. How are they able to make a statement like that?

The fact that Apple makes statements like this frustrates the hell out of me.

Nobody Is On Ping

Most of my friends aren’t on Ping as of right now. While I’ve found about 10 people to follow, every name I search for shows up with nobody, or some random person who I don’t know. Apple has a huge market potential, but just one day after the product launched, a very small percentage of that market has used the service.

Apple Manipulates Consumers

The last thing I hate about Apple has nothing to do with their social network. It’s that they don’t roll out features in certain products for fear of cannibalizing other product lines. For example, right now I have a Mac Mini running my home entertainment center. Yesterday’s Apple TV launched without the ability to browse the internet, simply because they don’t want to stop people from buying Mac Minis.

They clearly have the ability to add a DVD player and internet browsing functionality but they just chose not to. It’s a model that values exploiting the consumer over accelerating the pace of technology.

In Apple’s Favor

While there are plenty of reasons that Apple Ping won’t be as successful as Facebook, there are a few things that Apple has to its advantage. The first is that Apple has access to the largest set of digital savvy consumers. These individuals are likely to make online purchases, and more importantly, they make many of those purchases directly within iTunes. While a large percentage of the world is cut off from Apple, the company has access to the most influential consumers (those who spend the most on digital goods).

There are plenty of factors working against Apple’s social network right now, however the company has a lot of things that make it a competitive threat to Facebook: their payments platform, their large device-based distribution network, and a number of other things. Additionally, the battle to be the leading mobile social network has not been won yet. Facebook is clearly in the lead, however Apple just made their service compatible with the more than 150 million iOS compatible devices worldwide.

The bottom line is this: the battle to become the reigning social network is not over yet.

This article is published by AllFacebook, click here to read the original article.

In a guest post on Mashable today, Bill Zielke, senior director of Merchant Services at PayPal, divulged some interesting statistics in relation to his company’s mobile commerce and payments position.

PayPal has made a lot of progress recently on the mobile front, including integrating its ubiquitous payment technology in numerous apps and mobile services. The company was one of the first to dive into mobile payments in a big way. Because of it, PayPal is on track to process more than $500 million in mobile payments in 2010. This is following dramatic growth, increasing nearly six-fold from $25 million in 2008 to $141 million in 2009.

Zielke said more than 5 million members regularly use PayPal from a mobile device, with those numbers rising substantially as their respective mobile apps have matured overtime. This is in line with estimates that peg consumer spending via mobile devices at $119 billion by 2015, accounting for roughly 8% of all e-commerce activity.

Mobile usage of the Twitter social network has increased more than 60% in the past five months, according to data from Twitter.

Mobile Twitter Usage Grows
The total number of mobile Twitter users grew 62% between April and September 2010, according to statistics compiled by Twitter. In addition, since that time, the number of Twitter users who start out using Twitter via mobile device has risen from 5% to 16%. Furthermore, close to half (46%) of all Twitter users at least occasionally access the network via mobile device.

Twitter cites its April 2010 purchase of the Tweetie iPhone application, which it turned into the Twitter for iPhone app, as the catalyst for this explosive growth. In addition, Twitter has partnered with mobile OEM RIM on a BlackBerry app and also developed an Android app since that time.

Twitter.com Remains Top App
Tracking log-ins by unique Twitter visitors in the past 30 days, Twitter finds that the main Twitter.com site is still by far the most popular Twitter application, used by 78% of visitors (percentages add up to more than 100% because a single visitor may use multiple log-in methods).

The mobile m.twitter.com site followed with 14% usage. Other popular mobile means of accessing Twitter included SMS and Twitter for iPhone (8% each) and Twitter for BlackBerry (7%).

Mobile Website, SMS Beat Smartphones
As this data shows, while smartphone clients are important, there are even more people who use the mobile Twitter web site and/or SMS for mobile Twitter access. In addition, third-party clients continue to play an important role for many people, with what Twitter terms a “disproportionate” amount of the traffic from Twitter running through such tools.

Smartphones Drive Twitter Adoption in US and Europe
An analysis of Twitter usage via mobile for the six mobile markets currently reported by comScore (U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Italy) revealed thatTwitter is gaining adoption among smartphone users.

In the US, 8.3% of smartphone users (4.2 million people) accessed Twitter.com in a month via the browser on their mobile devices, outpacing each of the European markets. In Europe, 2.8% of smartphone users overall accessed Twitter.com (1.7 million users), with the UK experiencing the strongest penetration in the region at 5.8%, followed by Germany with 3.1% and France with 2.1%.

Stats are important –but on their own, they don’t tell us much
Stats on social networks are important, but don’t rely on them alone. Data is like fire, it can be used for good and bad, proper insight and analysis is always required. Beyond that, you’ll often see conflicting stats across the industry as everyone has different methodologies, as a result, this listing will help you to see the greater trends –not numbers without context.

How to interpret stats
Numbers don’t tell us much without insight and interpretation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage from many of the agencies and social networks themselves. The key is to look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time. Put more weight on active unique users in the last 30 days vs overall registered, in fact, the actual active conversion rate will often range from 10-40% of actual users sticking around and using the social network, so don’t be fooled by puffed numbers. No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage from multiple dimensions, so you also have to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.

This article is published by web-strategist, click here to read the whole article.